firefox to soon be gpu accelerated

[deadrats]

Last week, when Microsoft gave its preview of Internet Explorer 9 at Professional Developers Conference, it showed the upcoming browser's GPU-accelerated rendering capabilities.

President of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division Steven Sinofsky showed that IE8 can render Bing maps at 14 frames per second. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second -- impressive, indeed.

Microsoft isn't the only one thinking of leveraging GPU involvement for browser performance boosts, however, as Mozilla has been cooking up something similar in its kitchen too.

On the day of Microsoft's IE9 demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard tweeted, "Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well - I'll bet we'll ship it first. "

i must say i am a tad perplexed; on the one hand gpu acceleration for browsers will be a very welcome thing, anyone that has ever had multiple tabs (and i don't mean 5 or 6) open in firefox knows how slow the rendering can be when you switch from tab to tab or when you restore a previous session and all the pages have to be rendered but i can't help but wondering if it's a bit late to the game, sandy bridge with the hybrid cpu/gpu architecture will be here by then, which will handle "gpu acceleration" within the cpu itself, bulldozer won't be far behind, so what's the point?

i suppose a case could be made that not everyone will immediately upgrade to these new architectures, so for those with older hardware gpu accelerated browsers would be a God sent, but the odd thing is the choice of api, namely direct x?!?

firefox is open source software, these guys pride themselves on offering one of the premiere open source apps, why would they use a proprietary api to achieve gpu acceleration? now it's true they can't use opengl since that's only for 3d acceleration but why not opencl? that way they could bring gpu accelerated browsing to linux, unix, os x and solaris.

on a related topic, i wonder how much it would cost me to get that chick in the firefox tank top to "accelerate" my "gpu" for a couple of hours?

[Noahtuck]

on a related topic, i wonder how much it would cost me to get that chick in the firefox tank top to "accelerate" my "gpu" for a couple of hours?

That comment is worthless without photos, or at least a link :P

[deadrats]

on a related topic, i wonder how much it would cost me to get that chick in the firefox tank top to "accelerate" my "gpu" for a couple of hours?

That comment is worthless without photos, or at least a link :P

d'oh!!!

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/firefox-gpu-acceleration-dx11,9151.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/Firefox-girl-porn,0101-170-0----jpg-.html